The job cuts amount to less that 10 per cent of the company’s total sales force.

According to The Verge, Microsoft’s cloud and server businesses have been fuelling revenue recently, with server products and cloud services revenue up 15 per cent and Azure revenue itself growing by 93 per cent in the recent quarter.

US-based analyst house Pacific Crest Securities said last month that Microsoft Azure Cloud platform could overtake Amazon Web Services (AWS) as revenue leader in the public cloud market this year.

Microsoft has 71,000 employees in the US and 121,000 employees around the globe.